Atonement
by V.M. Bell
Summary: One day, in the future, Peter and Claire meet.


**Atonement**

How many years it has been since she put a bullet in his heart and watched him tumble to the pavement, inexorably, perhaps deliberately -- she cannot count the years, although she is certain that, if she tried, she could order the numbers the way they were meant to be ordered, a careful march through time from which she had long ago strayed. So she does not count and merely touches the dead eyelids, the dead lips, the dead scar slashed across his face, tracing their stillness. It is curious, she thinks, that he could be dead (that he has been dead, she corrects). She permits herself a moment of curiosity and wonders, not for the first time, what death is. Perhaps life is a song, and death is the final and everlasting chord. Eternity -- that, and the accompanying of sense of recklessness, she understands quite well, but what she wants to know is this: what is it like to have an end, a moment when all turns to black and sense of self is lost?

She lays a hand on Peter's forehead and imagines him to be her son, a little boy stricken with fever and calling for mommy, rather than her dead uncle.

"I remember this."

Claire hides her hands behind her back and spins around. She has known him for a few days now, this new Peter that appeared at her doorstep years after she had killed his future incarnation, but she still cannot admit that he is here, that he somehow exists.

"Peter, you scared me," she says.

"Do you still have that knife?" He is standing by the doorway, leaning against the wall.

"What knife? What are you talking about?"

He unbuttons his shirt, fumbling with the buttons, until it hangs limply at his sides. She eyes the scars on his chest, but two are more prominent than the others. "You know," he says, smiling slightly, "that one."

"I -- I have no idea," she stammers, looking away. "I can't really remember much of anything, most of the times."

She looks away from him and fixes her attentions back on his lifeless future form. She is more familiar with that Peter, she decides, though not without a certain appreciation for the irony. Even when she could profess nothing but the deepest loathing for him, for all that he had made them -- made _her _-- endure, she has never forgotten his glass-like expression in death. And she remembers that day, that day when she had been sipping tap water from a glass tumbler and standing by the window in her twenty-second-floor apartment. At a distance, she spotted a flock of birds flying towards her, and how close they were to the thin pane of glass between her and them before they veered towards the sky, daring towards infinity. Then the enormity of it -- the enormity of everything, faceless and enveloping -- struck her, drawing from her lips a cry; a cry, and that was all that was left of Claire Bennet.

A hand upon her shoulder -- she is startled by it, and when she turns to face Peter, she realizes that there are tears on her cheek and that they taste salty when they slip into her mouth.

"I tried to kill you," she says slowly.

"Yeah, you did."

"Well, I did kill you. I mean, sometimes I'm still not sure how the teleporting and the time traveling works, but is that part of your memory, what I did to you -- what I did to future Peter?"

He shook his head. "I remember it, but only because my present self was there to see it happen. It was a different future, Claire. It isn't my future, and it isn't my present either."

"Then are you -- are you the real Peter?"

"I don't know." He shrugs, tucking his hands in the pockets of his jeans. "I guess there must be many Peters out there, living in parallel universes -- maybe I would be in one now, if this had happened or if that hadn't happened -- and maybe every single one of them thinks that he is real. So, yeah, I'm real, I guess."

She takes a step towards him, the click of the heel of her shoe echoing as she finds herself only inches away. Tentatively, she touches the ridge of skin that she bequeathed to him some years past now brought to now. She would have lain limp, possibly bored, had someone run a scalpel across the same square of skin on her, so she tries to imagine what Peter must have felt when his niece turned it on him. It must have hurt awfully, she thinks, but long has there existed no correlation between the abuse and evisceration of one's physical body and the resultant hurt.

But her hands tremble as she slides her palm from one scar to the next, the whole of Peter's ultimate mortality within the span of her fingers, the warmth of a beating heart whispering beneath, then his arms press her against that pulse, and, shaking, she lets him hold her because, once upon a time, she was young and Peter was her father's brother and he was her keeper.

"Oh God, Peter, I'm so sorry. I was so _wrong_ about everything, more than I could have imagined, and when I realized it, it was too late." She pauses, breathing heavily between her sobs. "I killed so many people, and, somehow, that never mattered to me, but then I killed _you_, Peter, and I couldn't -- "

She mumbles a little bit more, words dissolving into syllables, but he does not seem to notice and kisses her on the forehead. "Hey, Claire, it's me -- everything will be all right now, okay? I promise you."

"No, it won't. You need to -- you need to forgive me, Peter. Please forgive me."

Claire watches as his eyes flicker to where his dead self, who is not really his self, lies upon a metal examiner's table. How strange it must be, she thinks, to see oneself like that, the myriad of future possibilities lessened by one, and how strange it is, that he is here now, raised from the death to which one of his own blood had imprisoned him.

"We've all made mistakes, you as well as I, but all of this is too complicated for blame to be assigned that easily. I'm just Peter Petrelli -- who am I, right? I don't have any power to forgive anyone or, well, to not forgive anyone, but you're Claire Bennet, and you've never needed forgiveness, Claire, not from me."

She shakes her head. "That's not -- " she begins, but Peter lays a finger over her lips, and she relapses into silence.

"You've tried to hurt me, and I'm guilty of trying to hurt you too, but none of that matters anymore. I love you, Claire," he says, "and we'll learn to forgive ourselves in time, I think."

_Love_ -- she wraps her lips around the word but does not speak.He kneels on the floor, his bones no doubt protesting against the concrete, and she kneels too. He wipes away her tears, rubs them between his fingers, and looks at her. She wills herself to look back, trying to disregard the wrinkles that crinkle his skin when he smiles, and she wonders if this is not so different from when they first met: Claire, the normal teenager growing less ordinary with each passing day, and, standing in a hallway of her high school, the dark-haired stranger endowed with the responsibility of delivering the world from certain destruction but unknowingly charged with her own salvation as well.

Perhaps, she thinks as she reaches for his hands, grasping them tightly as their foreheads touch, she may yet be saved.


End file.
